Switching To HTTPS: SEO Implications And How To [LNIM114]

Switching to https can seem like an alphabet soup of acronyms and tech gibberish. This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, I talk about moving LateNightIM.com from the insecure http protocol to the secure https protocol that takes advantage of SSL. HTTP is the agreed upon was (protocol) that your web server uses to talk to web browsers. Add an “S” to the end, and you have a secure version of that protocol that uses SSL. SSL, or Secure Socket Layer, is one of the underlying encryption technologies that makes HTTPS possible.

I discuss the possible SEO advantages of the move and the way that I accomplished it using CloudFlare and a cool plugin called Really Simple SSL. Basically Google wants you to switch to HTTPS and they are apparently willing to give you a small search engine bump as an incentive,

In case you missed it, last week I discussed all about email marketing and the progress my buddy Cliff is making with ConvertKit. You can get the replay of the webinar that I mentioned right here.

Next week I’m planning on publishing an episode on Thanksgiving Day. Stay tuned.

Show Notes

Late Night Listener Feedback: What is the best approach in embedding a video in ConvertKit? Know what it is that you want to accomplish: sending traffic to your website, getting people in your mailing list or building a presence elsewhere? Your answer lies there.

Internet Marketing News: Penguin 4.0, Google’s real-time algorithm, is now going to start paying attention to unnatural outbound links. If your website has a bunch of do-follow links, Google will start reducing the authority of that page or issue manual spam penalties. If your site has this, you need to stop and get rid of these links, or mark them as no-follow.

Moving to a Secure Transport Protocol –you might notice that in websites such as Amazon, instead of the normal HTTP, their site will say HTTPS with a lock icon in it. Hypertext transfer protocol is the language that computers use to talk to each other and to transfer information from a web server to a web browser so the information can go reliably from point A to point B. In using an HTTPS, you are sending your information in code as it is sent using a secure version of HTTP called secure socket layer (SSL) so no one can eavesdrop on the information that you are sending. Google has deemed it appropriate to give better rankings to websites which uses HTTPS so explains why I decided to switch even if I do not handle financial information. It is a signal to Google that you care about being a trusted website and you are offering the best possible experience to your readers. You have two options in switching to HTTPS:

If you are using a webhost, you will notice that they support this directly so you can follow their instructions.

Use reverse proxies such as CloudFlare so you can automatically get access to a generic security certificate and the Really Simple SSL Plugin.

Don’t forget to change your site details in Google Webmaster Tools (now called Google Search Console) and in Google Analytics when switching to https.. I show the Google Analytics case below. In Google Search Console, you just add another site (with https instead of http). I'd keep them both in there.

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Switching To HTTPS Episode Transcript

As I record this, Thanksgiving is just over a week away here in the United States. If you’re one of those very interesting people in Canada you’ve already had your Thanksgiving. This confuses me greatly. Maybe someone from Canada wants to explain that to me in the show notes.

Happy Thanksgiving to you, whether you’re in the United States or not.

Here in the United States it’s a traditional holiday where what we should be doing (and I think what a lot of people are doing) is we sit around and talk about and celebrate stuff that we’re thankful for. My list is very long. It’s very traditional to gather around family. Most of us are quite thankful for our families. Usually you have that uncle that nobody wants to talk about that’s kind of a drag, but other than that you’re super thankful for your family.

Sometimes though it can be a little hard to take the time to figure out what else you’re thankful for. After all, most of the things that have your attention a lot of times in life are the things that you’re trying to fix, the stuff that bugs you, the stuff you haven’t yet accomplished. I think a lot of times people get all caught up in the stuff that they don’t have, that they haven’t done, that has gone wrong that they’re trying to fix, and they’re forget to spend time thinking about all of the things that they are super thankful for.

There are a lot of things that I want to accomplish in my internet business, sometimes so much so that it’s completely overwhelming. I just feel like how come I’ve been working on this for so long and I don’t have an audience the size of Pat Flynn. It’s really easy to fall in that trap. The truth of the matter is I do have a fantastic audience – that’s you guys – and it is large. In fact, my audience is bigger than most podcasters will ever have. And in fact most people who think about or wish that they had a podcast won’t even ever take any action to go actually build a podcast.

So I should be thankful. I’ve made so much amazing progress in my internet business, I’m really thankful for that. And I’m thankful for the relationships that I’ve built both with listeners and other internet marketers that I’ve gotten to know along the way, like Pat and Cliff, and these other guys and gals that are my friends. There is just so much to be thankful for.

I challenge you this week to take a minute, maybe specifically related to your business ideas or pursuits, or wherever you are in your online journey, and take account of all of the stuff that you’ve been able to accomplish or that God has given you the ability to someday accomplish, your talents that you have, and be thankful for those. This is a really good time of year to do that and it will give you the energy that you need to push forward into 2017. I encourage you to do that this week.